Charles Rhines: Death undeserved, murderer contends

Feb. 2, 2014

Charles Rhines, shown in the early 1990s, says a case he saw on TV during his time in the South Dakota State Pentientiary was a revelation to him. 'It finally hit me between the eyes what I had done to Peggy Schaeffer,' he says of his murder of her son, Donnivan in 1992. / Submitted photo

Darin Young

Doug Weber / Emily Spartz-Argus Leader

Steve Hickey

Steve Hickey

He felt that way in 1993, when a jury sentenced him to death by lethal injection, and he feels that way today.

Rhines doesn’t deny the facts.

That he stabbed Donnivan Schaeffer to death in a Rapid City doughnut shop.

That’s he’s a sociopath.

But Rhines, 57, and the state’s longest-serving death row inmate, insists he’s no worse than dozens of other killers, and in more than 100 page of correspondence with the Argus Leader, he said he’s come to understand the implications of his crime.
Charles Rhines timeline: The crime and the time on death row

The McLaughlin native is convinced revenge, not justice, is behind his death sentence. In a letter this month, he listed 17 other murderers in South Dakota for whom no death sentence was sought.

“It’s not like it was a major crime,” Rhines wrote last May. “I pointed out to the police at the time that a dozen murders had occurred in Rapid City over the previous year (1991-92), mostly Native Americans killing Native Americans, but they count, too, don’t they?”

And he says his death won’t bring closure to his victim’s family.

'People who've done ... worse things'

His arguments align closely with the positions of those who wish to abolish the death penalty in South Dakota, including the sponsor of this year’s bill, Rep. Steve Hickey of Sioux Falls.

Hickey’s bill would not overturn the sentence for Rhines or the two other men on death row, but the pastor agrees with the inmate’s view on the use of capital punishment.

“There are a lot of people in the penitentiary who’ve done worse things than him,” Hickey said. “It’s certainly not the case that we’re only pursuing the death penalty for the worst of the worst.”

Others are not convinced.

The picture Rhines paints of himself through the letters — a young man failed by his schools, his family and the institutions meant to mold him — stands in stark contrast to the assessments of those closest to the case, and those who’ve waited more than two decades for justice.
Blog: Conversations with a killer

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Peggy Schaeffer, the mother of Donnivan Schaeffer, read most of Rhines letters in December.

“Nothing in there changes anything for me,” Peggy Schaeffer said. “It’s the same kind of thing he’s been saying for years.”

Master manipulator, former warden says

Doug Weber, the former state prison warden who carried out all three of the state’s recent executions, oversaw Rhines for years. The former warden sees the inmate as a master manipulator whose attitude and behavior align with the jury’s sentence.

“I don’t think, if he’d been serving a life sentence, that he’d have been out of administrative segregation,” Weber said. “He’s an extremely intelligent, but an extremely dangerous individual.”

Heather Shepard, who was 16 years old when Rhines threatened to kill her to stop her from revealing what she knew about the unsolved murder, puts it more bluntly.

“He should have been dead 15 years ago,” she said. “Justice has not been swift.”

Burst of laughter after the murder

The Rhines case might seem like a robbery gone wrong, but the people involved see it as much more than that — especially given his behavior after the crime.

Steve Allender, now the Rapid City Police Chief, spent months tracking the killer before Rhines was captured in Seattle.

“It was evil. I’ve been in this business for 30 years, and the only nightmare I’ve ever had about police work was about him,” Allender said. “I feared him to a great extent.”

Donnivan Schaeffer was working as a courier March 8, 1992. He was picking up supplies from Dig ’Em Donuts as Rhines, a former shop employee, was rooting though an office desk for cash.

Schaeffer walked into the office, and Rhines sprung upon him with a hunting knife, stabbing him twice.

The young man pleaded, begging Rhines to take him to the hospital as he was lead into a storeroom and sat on a wooden pallet.

After his capture in King County, Wash., Allender took Rhines’ confession. The memory is haunting.

“(Rhines) was talking very calmly, but then he busted out this awful laugh that was three times as loud as his normal voice,” Allender said.

Allender thinks that burst of laughter, along with the cold, calculating description, played a part in the jury’s decision to hand Rhines a death sentence. The confession tape had the jury on the edge of their seats, he said.

“That had a huge impact,” Allender said.

'Shouldn't have gotten death ... in the first place'

Rhines also thinks that laugh swayed the jury.

It was a single “haw,” he writes. In the years since the trial, he claims police and prosecutors have unfairly called him out for “bursting into laughter,” for being “sexual predator” and for being more dangerous than he actually is.

Rhines, who is gay, claims his sexual orientation concerned the jurors — enough so that they submitted nine questions to Judge John Konenkamp, who now is a justice on the South Dakota Supreme Court. At least three of the questions related to Rhines’ sexuality and how that would play out in jail: “Will Mr. Rhines be allowed to have a cellmate or will he be jailed alone?”

The questions went unanswered. Rhines didn’t even know they had been asked until after the verdict.

“It’s pretty obvious they were contemplating my sexuality in their deliberations after they had promised not to do so, and both the prosecutor and judge realized that when they saw the list,” Rhines wrote.

The inmate’s brother, Karl Rhines of Harrisburg, agrees.

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“If (the judge) had answered those questions, it would have made a difference,” Karl Rhines said.

Karl Rhines doesn’t dispute that his younger brother committed a horrible murder and deserves punishment. Before his brother’s crime, he was a supporter of the death penalty.

“I didn’t know what I know now: It’s not a deterrent, it doesn’t help the victim’s family, and the cost factor is outrageous,” Karl Rhines said.

Monotonous prison life, waiting for death

Charles Rhines has plenty of time to ruminate on the trial in his cell, which is 13˝ long by 6˝ feet wide. But he mostly focuses on his routine.

“How have I passed the days, months, years? One day at a time, mostly on ‘automatic’ and not thinking about the death penalty. You just cannot dwell on that or it becomes everything to you,” he wrote. “Dwelling on anything for too long will make you nuts.”

Unlike most states that use capital punishment, South Dakota does not have a dedicated death row. Instead, Rhines and the two other men sentenced to die — Briley Piper and Rodney Berget — live in an administrative segregation wing with about 20 other high-risk inmates.

Like the others in administrative segregation, Rhines is on lock-down for 23 hours a day, with an hour of recreation time.

Unlike the others, death row inmates are not allowed physical contact with anyone, aside from Department of Corrections staff, lawyers and approved clergy members. Even family members speak to them through glass, and the inmate’s hands and feet remain bound any time they leave their cell.

Most inmates in Charles Rhines’ wing have cellmates, but he does not.

During recreation time, Charles Rhines stands in one of two mesh cages, 8 feet wide by 20 feet long, inside the segregation wing. Another inmate will stand next to him, giving him a chance at conversation. For several years, he’s shared recreation time with Briley Piper. Before that, he shared rec time with Moeller.

He also can yell at the others in the wing through his cell door.

The days start early, with a knock at the door delivering breakfast about 6:30 a.m. After the “reasonably edible” meal, he drinks coffee and watches CNN on his 15-inch flat-screen television.

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“After walk-throughs I settle into the day’s routine, depending on what I want to do ... crawl back into bed and take a nap or do some bead work, or watch a little TV,” he wrote.

Lunch arrives at 10:30 a.m., and rec time often follows, which involves being handcuffed at the hands and feet and led from his cell to the cages. After putting on about 20 pounds in six months, he wrote, he’s begun working out again.

“An hour of calisthenics three times a week is my limit — I ain’t a kid anymore,” he wrote.

After rec time comes a trip, again in restraints, to a locked shower stall.

For the rest of the day, he watches television, does bead-work crafts, crossword puzzles or reads. After 20 years, he writes, “I’ve read everything worth reading” from the penitentiary library.

By 11 p.m. or midnight, he’s back in bed.

Changed perspective about enormity of crime

The daily routine helps him avoid despair.

But more than two decades have given him time to reflect on his crime and how he came to commit it.

More than once in his letters, Charles Rhines refers to the suicide case of Jamey Rodemeyer, a bisexual teenager from Buffalo, N.Y., who committed suicide after being bullied online.

Seeing Rodemeyer’s mother on cable news finally showed him the effects of his crime.

“It finally hit me between the eyes what I had done to Peggy Schaeffer. Just at the cusp of her beloved child becoming an independent person, a responsible adult with a family and friends surrounding him and his mother waiting expectantly for grandchildren to spoil, having all that snatched away for almost no reason at all and the hole it has had to have left in her heart,” he wrote. “Prosecutors talk of closure, but that wound will never close, no matter how long it is there.”

Rhines says he should have had help as child

Rhines, the fourth and youngest child, said he faced his own struggles growing up, including attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. He said he needed a child psychologist, but his mother was too proud and didn’t want him to have a stigma.

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“I often heard my mother tell me that I needed to learn to ‘swallow my pride,’ but you know, I never saw her do that,” Charles Rhines wrote.

Peggy Schaeffer wasn’t impressed by Rhines’ words of remorse.

“If he were sorry, he could have said it a long time ago,” Schaeffer said. “Now, 20 years later, he’s sorry? Uh-uh.”

Rhines wasn’t surprised by Schaeffer’s reaction. In a January letter, the inmate attached a Dennis the Menace cartoon with the caption “I guess saying I’m sorry over and over ... isn’t helping?”

“The only change she wants to see from me is to see me change from living to dead,” he said.

Different ways of coping with the wait for death

Life on death row becomes a grind, Charles Rhines said.

Friends lose touch.

“People move on with their lives while we sit here and (molder),” he wrote.

Briley Piper, for instance, convicted and sentenced to death for the torture murder of Chester Allan Poage, began his term as a gregarious young man, Charles Rhines said, but soon saw his letters slow and the calls to his friends dwindle.

“One by one his ‘buds’ dropped out of the picture, until he is left with, as I am, family only,” he wrote.

Piper turned to religion, and a nun visits weekly, he wrote.

Eric Robert, on the other hand, came in frustrated.

Life on death row weighed heavily on the Wisconsin man, who was put to death less than two years after he murdered correctional officer Ronald “R.J.” Johnson in a failed 2011 escape attempt.

“Eric Robert just couldn’t handle the conditions in Ad. Seg. He could not figure out how we put up with this place,” he wrote.

Robert did not appeal his sentence. Donald Moeller was put to death a few weeks later, having given up his appeals after more than 20 years on death row. Elijah Page also ended his appeals and faced execution.

Robert Leroy Anderson, sentenced to die for the murders of two women, hanged himself before the state could carry out his sentence.

Inmates sentenced to death treated differently

Condemned inmates are not allowed physical contact with others, by law, but other restrictions evolved over time as a means of respecting the designation given to death row inmates by a jury.

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“The men who are on death row have been deemed by the law, by the courts and by society — specifically by the jurors — as being the most dangerous human beings that we could come in contact with,” Weber, the former warden, said.

Darin Young, who succeeded Weber last year as penitentiary warden, said it’s a balance with the risk.

“We treat them very professionally, but we treat them appropriately based on the risk they pose,” Young said.

'Institutional vengeance,' to death penalty foe

The disparity in treatment is troublesome for Rep. Hickey. Prosecutors decide to seek a death sentence based on a number of factors that could apply to any number of cases.

Those who receive the death penalty are stuck on death row. Those who do not have the chance to live a less-restricted life behind bars with outdoor recreation, job and educational opportunities and the chance to visit friends and family on a regular basis.

Donald Moeller raped and killed 9-year-old Rebecca O’Connell in 1990 and was sentenced to death. Kelly Van Engelenhoven raped and killed 11-year-old Katie Clarey the following year and was sentenced to life in prison after Clarey’s family persuaded prosecutors not to seek a death sentence.

That doesn’t seem like justice to Hickey, and he said he doesn’t think it puts the state on firm moral footing.

Honoring the victim, to death penalty backers

Peggy Schaeffer disagrees.

She and Dottie Poage, the mother of Piper’s victim, sometimes run into one another when bills such as Hickey’s show up in Pierre. They talk about their losses, about the wrenching pain of knowing how different their lives have become through the actions of another person.

“We don’t get together often, but when we do, we’re talking,” Peggy Schaeffer said.

Karl Rhines thinks about Dottie Poage from time to time, as well. What he thinks about is a photo she held up for cameras after the execution of Elijah Page in 2007.

In it was her son, Chester, a smiling, laughing toddler in a plaid shirt and blue vest.

“I hate to be the one to say it, but even Charlie was lovable when he was 4 years old. He was kind and whimsical and curious,” Karl Rhines said. “My parents loved Charlie, and they thought he was a good kid.”